Aleck
2847
Remember how Sony marketed the PS3 as so powerful they couldn’t export it to Iran?
(actually, they couldn’t export it to Iran…)
The difference will be much larger. It was such a struggle for developers to maintain parity across both platforms this generation because of the disparate architectures, even though the overall power was very similar. This time, however, because of the architectural similarities the PS4 versions will just have a significant performance advantage effectively with zero effort. 50% more shader power, twice the fill rate, 40% more memory and no memory management overhead will lead to far greater visual differences next gen than anything that happened on PS3 and 360.
Xbox came out 18 months later. And the PS2 killed the Dreamcast with the promise of far more powerful hardware.
Remember when the Air Force built a supercomputer out of PS3s?
Which would likely account for a decent part the PlayStation 2’s extremely successful launch, though probably not a significant quantity of the 155 million units it sold in its lifetime.
And the Xbox had to come behind quite a bit as an unknown quantity from Microsoft, of all places, against the PS2’s juggernaut. And did fairly well, I would say. Also, how many people would you think bought the Xbox just because it was more powerful as opposed to, I don’t know, really wanting to play Halo?
I think people purchased both the PS2 and the Xbox primarily based on a combination of features (hard drive! Ethernet port! LIVE! It plays DVDs!), exclusives (are you joking? Halo received tons of coverage. Tons.) and price (I believe both consoles were slightly more than the competition but they also offered more). To the extent someone purchased an Xbox over a PS2 because they were expecting a quantum leap in graphics, they were fooling themselves.
Phred
2851
Have you got a link for this as all I’ve seen says the opposite, including quotes from EA Management.
I think people purchased both the PS2 and the Xbox primarily based on a combination of features (hard drive! Ethernet port! LIVE! It not only plays games but DVDs!), exclusives (are you joking? Halo received tons of coverage. Tons. The PS2 had GTA as an exclusive for the longest time) and price (I believe both consoles were slightly more than the competition but they also offered more). To the extent someone purchased an Xbox over a PS2 because they were expecting a quantum leap in graphics, they were fooling themselves. Do I think some people made their buying decision based primarily on specs? Well, sure. But I think most consumer - whether true or not - believe they are rationale consumers and they make their decisions based on a variety of factors - and for consoles: price, features, exclusives > specs.
Well, in this generation, there doesn’t seem to be a super strong exclusive lineup. Many games seem to be going multi platform.
The ps4 is a more or less a traditional game console. The xbone’s special features are unappealing to many.
So yes, it really does come down to price and specs, which is the problem for Microsoft. I think most people could see paying a premium price for premium specs or paying a lower price for budget specs, but a premium price for budget specs is insulting.
There may not be any exclusive line ups that are super appealing to many right now, but Infamous: Second Son has a large interest for me. Then there’s the fact that naughty dog will still likely be exclusive to PS4, adding another point to ps4 for me.
So far I’ve not seen many exclusives of interest to me for Xbox One, and Xbox has never really had many exclusive studios that drew my interest even with the 360.
Sony owns Naughty Dog, so yes they will be exclusive.
JeffL
2856
On the comment that the PS4 is just a higher resolution PS3 - I assume that statement is meant to include everything that comes with more powerful hardware (smoother running, less pop-ups, etc.)
And that is all I want. My reason for owning my 360 and PS3 is playing games. I do use them for Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. but in the den I actually now use my $99 Roku 3 for that (and prefer it.) With one button push on my remote control I switch back and forth between my game and TV. I have no unmet needs the Kinect meets.
I just want a gaming console. I use the 360 for most of my gaming now, because it seems to be a bit more powerful for gaming than the PS3 - I like how games look and run on it a little better than on the PS3, plus Skyrim did not run well at all on the PS3 and Bethesda could not program well on it.
It seems to me that if you want a nex gen console to play games on, the more powerful hardware is the way to go. If I was buying a PC for which gaming was my 99% use, I would not pick one with a less powerful system, less memory for the CPU and GPU, proprietary HDD requirements, etc. just because it had a super webcam. But I suppose that makes me outside of Microsoft’s target market - the gamer that just wants the best console for simply playing games.
dytexx
2857
… but, but Television! TV! Halo as TV!
How Microsoft is going to try and make their TV box approach fly anywhere else than the USA will be very interesting in a Schadenfreude-way. They are already working against a general perception of “Playstation” as eponymic for gaming consoles in large parts of Europe and now they are moving even further away from gaming with the Xbox name. If Microsoft were clever, they would have to buy exclusivity for FIFA to really harm Sony’s dominance in Europe.
The TV stuff is all bullshit. It uses an IR blaster, for chrissakes. We already know that approach is a failure due to googleTV. It only supports liveTV… in 2014, when everybody has a DVR. It’s useless garbage.
I do like the HDMI passthrough. Saves an input on the TV. But hardly a marquee feature.
RickH
2859
Exactly, I’m a long way past the stage in my life where I would do something the “gee whiz” way just for giggles.
Last night, I sat in my office and listened to my middle son fighting with the Kinect as he watched video on the 360 in the living room. Every once in a while, the Kinect would pause the video for no apparent reason. THE FUTURE IS HERE!
I’m sure they use HDMI CEC where available, though of course I’m sure the percentage of people that have devices with good CEC support is very low and even CEC is pretty much ‘fire & forget’ (just somewhat more reliable than IR blasting because of removing the wireless bit) as far as command logic goes, so it doesn’t solve a lot of the thorny problems I’m sure the Xbox One will have when trying to combine its own logic with a DVR, for example.
“Hey guys, don’t worry, it’s really faster than we thought!”
They do use HDMI CEC, from what I’ve heard, but it is indeed very rare. I was looking into the Roku streaming stick, and very few TVs support it. Besides, you would need to have your TV plugged directly into the wall and again, most people use a set top box DVR.
theoretically faster, somewhat but not exactly like the way the PS3 was theoretically much faster than the 360.
Cyrano
2864
Wow, it really only supports live TV? Is that confirmed? I thought it could control my Dish DVR, but we never watch live TV – if something’s on live that we want to watch, we record it to watch later so we can skip the ads. Live TV only is nearly worthless to me.
jpinard
2865
While it is good they’re optimizing, this is mostly digging into the ether to make up an excuse to up-rate their cheapo RAM decision. The biggest difference I think we’ll see between consoles (with a minimum of effort on dev side) is better FSAA and AF on the Sony PS4. Outside of that, if you took a game like Arma 2 with huge maps, it would perform light years better on the PS4 due to the constant streaming of high-res map data though memory (though the hard drive or Blu-Ray performance would impact that as well).
4 months ago, Microsoft had the over-confidence and hubris of a bully with their huge fees (on gamers and dev’s, forced publishers to cut out dev profits) and over-emphasis on corporate partnerships at the expense of actual gamers. It is really nice to see them dealing with many of the concerns we’ve all had. I think the last two they need to address are:
- Forcing developers to have a publisher.
- Allowing us to have Kinect 2 turned off while we’re playing games.
stusser
2866
Think about it for a moment. How could it work with your DVR? The xbone has a HDMI passthrough and an IR blaster. There’s no two-way communication.
Now of course two-way communication is possible, if your DVR supports HDMI-CEC or has an interface exposed to your local network. But those interfaces are rare, every one is different, there’s no standard, and there are thousands of DVR models in the wild. IR blasting “change to channel 201” is one thing; actually integrating with all those DVRs is an impossible goal.
On another note, MS is sticking with those huge fees. Time-warner cable just announced that users will be able to use their Xboxes as essentially IP-based cable boxes, tuning into hundreds of channels. I have this same service on my desktop computer, my ipad and my roku box, and it’s pretty cool… and free. No surprise, MS is requiring xbox live gold to use it.
